Rebuilding a Temple

My business is with building, especially monumental building, one of the basic non-agricultural activities of any society which attains a certain level of technological achievement and of surplus of production over subsistence. For brevity I confine myself to Archaic and Classical Greece, to temple building, and to one specific temple, that of Apollo at Delphi. Four reasons prompt that limitation:

The evidence. The processes of financing and management which created non-public buildings (houses, farms, etc.) are virtually undocumented epigraphically from Classical Greece, even for major genres such as synoikiai or bath-houses. ¹ Even for public buildings, until well into the fourth century BC, only the construction of temples was felt to require accessible record in permanent public form. ²

Whereas Athenian public and cultic buildings have attracted much English-language scholarship, and whereas Epidaurus has been well served in English, the complex tale of building activity at Delphi after 373 has been far less accessible. While Bousquet’s exemplary scholarship has now allowed its economic, social, and political implications to emerge, access to CID ii needs both Greek and French. A summary in English may therefore both help students and illustrate the theme of this volume. ³

Temple building serves as a trace element. Though it required more complex skills, materials and technologies than ordinary house building, those needed for synoikiai, the larger country houses of Attica, the Adelssitzen of Thessaly, or secular public buildings will have been comparable. To focus on temple construction, therefore, is indirectly to sense how building activity came to affect Greek society and economy.

Such a focus helps to place temple building within the drives and values of Greek society. The ostensible purpose of a temple might be pious, to honour a god by housing him or her appropriately; the unstated purpose might stem rather from motives of campanilismo, competitive ostentation, or political calculation. Delphi shows them all.